


Avalanche

by beer_good



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Apocalypse, Character Undeath, Child Death, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Hardhome, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, Season/Series 05, Team White Walker, White Walkers, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 00:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5687347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Awareness comes to the being that was Karsi slowly, if it comes at all. It's not so much a matter of remembering who or what she is, as just knowing that she is. That she is walking. </i>
</p><p>After the battle of Hardhome, the wight that was the chieftain Karsi rises with all the others. Then she and everyone else in the white walkers' army start moving, slowly but surely, south. Snowflake by snowflake, winter. Is. Coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Avalanche

So here's one I've been mulling over ever since episode 5.08 ("Hardhome"). I wanted more Karsi, so ... Go team!

 **Title:** Avalanche  
**Author:** Beer Good   
**Fandom:** _Game of Thrones_ , post-s5  
**Rating:** PG13  
**Warnings:** Death, family unfriendly death, undeath, apocalypse.  
**Word count:** ~1200  
**Characters/Pairing:** Karsi  
**Summary:** After the battle of Hardhome, the wight that was the chieftain Karsi rises with all the others. Then she and everyone else in the white walkers' army start moving, slowly but surely, south. Snowflake by snowflake, winter. Is. Coming.

_Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.  
\- Richard Matheson_

 

**Avalanche**

Awareness comes to the being that was Karsi slowly, if it comes at all. It's not so much a matter of remembering who or what she is, as just knowing _that_ she is.

That she is walking. That is the first thing. One step after the other, through snow that reaches her ankles, feet, waist. She's a pair of legs, walking on feet that don't freeze though she's only wearing one boot. There's no effort that she notices. Pull one foot up, put it down; pull the other up, put it down. Movement. That is all she is. That is all: She is.

At some point, she is - not becomes, just is - vaguely aware that she was not. That she was, then was not, and now is again. The wounds on her body and the holes in her clothes are related to this. This is a fact. It carries no significance.

All the other wights marching at her side are part of her - some whole, some crawling, some naked, some carrying weapons, some old, some barely old enough to walk. They move in harmony, following the same pull; not in perfect step, not in this terrain, but like individual parts of one large being. The smaller ones helped over crevasses and mountains, the ones missing body parts dragged uphill, not out of camaraderie or love or by order but just as a fact. They don't want, they don't plan, they don't debate; they just are, together, one and the same.

When they meet resistance they flow over it, leaving nothing alive, leaving nothing dead. Everyone rises and joins them, becomes another pair of legs, fists, jaws with a common goal. When one of them falls, is too badly damaged to move on, they all feel it, and it all feeds their hunger. The white walkers ride among them sometimes, different from them - their eyes so piercing blue, their skin bright white - but riding the same wave, showing them the way.

South.

* * *

The wall, when they reach it, is too high. They rush it like a wave hitting shore, stepping on each other, piling up the icy face of it. The men up there bombard them with arrows, rocks, oil, think they win as the white army draws away, hurl triumphant insults that are blown away by the icy wind.

The wall ends at the coast. They wait as the ice spreads and the ocean waves freeze, then cross in its shadow, losing countless to cracks in the ice, marching in tatters that freeze into stiff armour. They follow the wall inland, pour into the black castle, wipe it clean from what little resistance the remaining fighters can offer and leave the men who stay on the wall to freeze.

She finds the two children in one of the rooms of the castle, with other refugees. She doesn't remember their names (doesn't remember names, has no use for the concept of names) but when there's nowhere left for them to run she holds them and squeezes them until they stop screaming. Then they rise and follow her, two more vibrations in the thrum. They are one.

South.

* * *

They don't move fast, but they never stop. The ice and snow are one with them. Through green forests where leaves shatter like glass, over plowed fields where the furrows gradually become stripes of white before disappearing entirely, across frozen rivers under burned bridges. She's aware of no conflict, no discord, no clash of wills among them. No wills. Just the pull, the act of walking, killing, rising as one, leaving only silence behind.

When they fall upon a larger settlement, it's always the same thing. Fighting (if you can even call it a fight) their way through poorly armed peasants at first, then terrified soldiers, and finally the men cowering inside walls meant to last for centuries. The men offer them gold, offer them women, offer them their own children, to no avail; they have no interest in the first, and see no difference between the others. For every wight that falls, ten new ones rise. Every sword raised against them ends up in their hands. Some meet them with fire, thousands of them are reduced to ashes, but fire burns out quickly in the cold and there's so many of them now that the stragglers pick off what the vanguard leaves behind.

The further they get, the more their job is done for them. Fear is a better weapon than anything their withered hands carry.

They walk through villages, towns, cities already burned to the ground, snow gathering on the ashes.

They walk across battlefields where bodies are becoming part of the landscape.

They're met not with armies, but with drunken looters searching the homes of those who have run. They leave only gold behind.

They interrupt battles where men continue to slit each other's' throats even as the wights fall upon them.

They overturn wagons packed with refugees, who then walk with them, tears freezing on their cheeks.

South.

* * *

King's Landing was built to withstand years of siege but the gate is open, bodies piled on both sides of the windlass. The soldiers inside, the ones not busy killing each other, offer little resistance; some organise and try to build barricades, others snipe from high windows, but the wights just keep pouring in and the snow they turn red soon turns to pink and then to white.

She helps clear the throne room. It's easy. Everyone's gathered around the throne like it matters, swinging their swords in blind panic, cutting down each other as often as not. The boy screaming at their centre is no different from the rest. Then, no different from them, part of the same wave as they continue south. They leave behind a dark throne room full of snow and a silent, peaceful city, windows turning into frozen waterfalls, towers into mountaintops, streets into ravines. The red and gold forgotten, with no one to remember it.

Then, for the first time, they stop. They've taken all of Westeros. There's nowhere to go but the sea.

She stands on the shore, watching the snowflakes whirl over the big water. Somehow, she knows that she's done this before and that there's always land on the other side. The water is as black as the shore is white. It seems it was blue when they got here. That there were waves. Now it's settling, thickening, the haze above it turning to millions of tiny ice crystals dancing in the breeze, making the air sparkle.

She waits, with her children and kin around her. An army of millions, staring at the sea, waiting as the snow falls upon them. She knows them all, every wound, every dried-up face, everything they've done together. She holds a weapon, an axe, her fingernails unthinkingly carving a pattern in the handle. Weapons are weapons, but somehow this one feels better in her hand. All around her, others are doing the same thing, others sitting down, looking at each other, or looking up as the white walkers ride into their midst to look out over the sea. Some move out of their way more slowly than others.

Karsi thinks she feels a different note somewhere in the thrum. She's not yet aware that she thinks this. Her children lean against her as the wind picks up.

A thin layer of ice is forming at the shore.


End file.
